Michael Sheen Takes Acting to Extremes

As an actor, Michael Sheen has been ubiquitous in the last few years. After anchoring the “Underworld” films in a reality that made their vampire-werewolf conflict seem cool, he established himself as a go-to guy for gravitas, taking on such roles as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “Twilight” major domo Aro, celebrity interviewer David Frost and “Tron: Legacy” schemer Castor.

In his new film, “Beautiful Boy,” he plays Bill, a closed-off husband and father coming to terms with the news that his son committed an unspeakable act of violence. Speakeasy sat down for a chat with the actor.

Your character never asks about other people’s feelings, much less acknowledges his own. How well-defined was the character and what did you have to do to construct his emotional unraveling?

He’s a character who is disconnected from himself, really. He’s character who can’t make choices or decisions because he doesn’t know how he feels about anything, because as we discover later on, he has a sort of secret that he is scared is true when he says, “I wish we’d never had him.”

He’s someone who’s so scared of what he feels he’s decided to not feel, and that puts him in a very difficult place at the beginning of the film. And so we did a lot of work on what the backstory for these characters was, because one of the things I really liked about the script was that it’s not about a couple being really happy at the beginning and then tragedy strikes and it pulls them apart. This is a couple who’s come to the end of the road really, they think, and then this happens.

Since this is a movie that is at least partly about what drives kids to commit these sorts of shootings, how careful do you have to be to seed a family dynamic that could lead to that behavior, but not overstate it?

Personally, I don’t think the film is about why the son did this. We look for an easy answer and we look for what the blame is, and not that there isn’t, but it’s not obvious, and this for me is a story that is more about is it possible for two people to meet each other again? What does it take when two people have gotten so separate and so isolated from each other – how is it possible for them to find each other again? I think everyone can relate to that – you start a relationship because you like the other person so much, and they make you feel a particular way, and the ultimate tragedy is that you can end up with the person you care about, that you most like, you can end up in the most difficult relationship with them. And is there a way to take that wall down?

Is there any analogous experience you can relate to what your character goes through in this film? Or is that important?

Well, I’ve certainly not been through anything like what happens to the characters in this, but I don’t have to murder someone to know what it’s like, or to be able to act it. So it’s an act of imagination, but you look for the meeting points; you look for the things that you can draw on yourself as a kind of stepping stone to get to where you need to get to. And just being a parent and knowing how you feel about your child and the incredibly complicated things that your child doing something that would be seen as being an evil act when you have unconditional love for a child, just the starting point for that for me anyway is just feeling how I feel about my child. But if you’re doing a play or a film and something really extreme has to happen to a character, and often when you’re doing theater or a Shakespeare play or a Greek play or something and there’s the moment where you discover, ah, I slept with my mother and I’ve killed my father, you kind of go, how do you do that? I can’t really draw on anything obvious to do that, and that’s acting.

You’ve played a real variety of different roles. Do you approach those different sorts of challenges in the same way as an actor?

Well, the process is always the same for me. It varies in terms of, I don’t know how much the character is in the film, or the amount of work I have to do or whatever, but the process is pretty much the same. In the case of “TRON: Legacy,” for instance, it was clear what I had to do in terms of my function within the story – I came in at a certain point, I had to bring a certain kind of energy to it, you think he’s one thing and he’s actually something else, and he’s got to be a showman, and he needs to be all of these things. It’s not like I go, oh, this is “Underworld,” or this is “TRON,” so I don’t need to do any work. It doesn’t work like that. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about genre films, and I think people have a very sort of patronizing attitude about them, but I love the fact that I do these very different kinds of things, because for me, they’re as valid, and one is no more worthy than the other.

Do you find that the imagination required for a character in a genre film to be more emboldening?

Well, I’ve always said that it’s like when you’re a kid, when I was playing with friends in the bedroom somewhere and pretending to be this, that and the other, we didn’t have any set or costume, it was just imagination. And yet you totally lose yourself in it, and so it’s sort of almost a purer form of acting. But one of my favorite writers is Philip K. Dick, and because it appears that he’s writing about things that don’t have to do with our world, it allows your imagination to come into play. So that’s what I find liberating about working on the fantastical elements of films is that it appears to not be about everyday things, when in fact that’s exactly what it’s about. It just allows us to see them in a different way, I think.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.